NEW
DELHI — Neha Kaul Mehra says she was only 7 years old the first time
she was sexually harassed. She was walking to a dance class in an
affluent neighborhood of New Delhi when a man confronted her and began
openly masturbating.

The police patrolled a New Delhi rally on Sunday after the cremation of a woman whose rape prompted widespread protests.

That
episode was far from the last. Years of verbal and physical sexual
affronts left Ms. Mehra, now 29, filled with what she described as
“impotent rage.”

Last week, she and thousands of Indian women like
her poured that anger into public demonstrations, reacting to news of
the gang rape of another young woman who had moved to the city from a
small village, with a new life in front of her.

That woman, a
23-year-old physiotherapy student, died Saturday from internal injuries
inflicted with a metal rod during the rape, which took place on a bus
two weeks ago.

In her story and its brutal ending, many women in the world’s largest democracy say they see themselves.

“That
girl could have been any one of us,” said Sangeetha Saini, 44, who took
her two teenage daughters to a candle-filled demonstration on Sunday in
Delhi. Women in India
“face harassment in public spaces, streets, on buses,” she said. “We
can only tackle this by becoming Durga,” she added, referring to the
female Hindu god who slays a demon.

Indian women have made impressive gains in recent years:
maternal mortality rates have dropped, literacy rates and education
levels have risen, and millions of women have joined the professional
classes. But the women at the heart of the protest movement say it was
born of their outraged realization that no matter how accomplished they
become, or how hard they work, women here will never fully take part in
the promise of a new and more prosperous India unless something
fundamental about the culture changes.

Indeed, many women in India say they are still subject to regular harassment and assault
during the day and are fearful of leaving their homes alone after dark.
Now they are demanding that the government, and a police force that
they say offers women little or no protection, do something about it.

Women
in Carrara, Italy protested at Sunday mass against a misogynistic
priest who suggested women incited domestic and sexual violence against
themselves.

“We decided to stage this protest because we think
that this ideology is basically shared by most of the Catholic Church
and society. This ideology has become one of the causes of violence
against women, which is actually an emergency in Italy,” said Alessandra
Verdini, an anthropologist and women’s rights activist who organized
the protest.

Father Piero Corsi of Liguria said in a Christmas bulletin
that the rise in domestic violence in Italy was caused by women serving
cold food, not looking after their children, not cleaning their home,
acting arrogant, and dressing provocatively.

The
church of Scientology -- which is not recognized as a faith in Belgium
-- and several of its top-ranking members face charges including
extortion, fraud, illegal practice of medicine and violation of privacy
laws, according to Flanders News.

The complaint stems from an
investigation of fraudulent labor contracts issued by the church of
Scientology in an effort to recruit new volunteers and members. A judge ordered raids on Scientology offices
in 2008 that allegedly uncovered a "wealth of evidence" that the
organization had spied on and extorted money from its members, according
to De Standaard.

An estimated 500 people belong to the church of
Scientology in Belgium. The organization's European headquarters are
located in Brussels.

Germany does not recognize Scientology as a faith,
and a 1997 state-level interior ministry report described the
organization's agenda and activities as "marked by objectives that are
fundamentally and permanently directed at abolishing the free democratic
basic order," Time reported in 2007.

Those
freedom-loving arsenal-builders love liberty soooooo much, y’all. The
want to hump it, lick it, and most importantly, take it to the shooting
range to share in the glory of the One and Only Real Liberty: the
liberty to believe the gun industry when they tell you their products
will deceive everyone else into thinking you’re a tough manly man.
They’re so into “freedom” they’re willing not just to tolerate periodic
pre-Christmas massacres of little kids and firefighters to preserve the
steady profits for gun manufacturers. They love the liberty of gun
companies to make a mint off the corpses of 1st graders and firemen so
much, in fact, that they’re willing to destroy every other right in
order to preserve the One and Only Real Liberty.

A
petition calling to deport pro-gun control CNN host Piers Morgan back
to England has easily surpassed the 25,000 that requires a response from
the White House. Started on Friday in Texas a few days after Morgan
called gun advocate Larry Pratt “an unbelievably stupid man”, the
petition accuses Morgan of engaging “in a hostile attack against the
U.S. Constitution” and wants to deport him “immediately for his effort
to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a
national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of
American citizens.”

The Constitution, of course,
doesn’t have any anti-American blather in it about due process or the
rule of law, and certainly nothing in it as subversive as saying that
people have things like “freedom of speech, or of the press”, nor to
peaceably assemble without the threat of a guy with a semiautomatic
weapon with an extended clip that can wipe them all out in less time
than it takes Glenn Reynolds to complete his obligatory quarterly
wife-humping. The Constitution is a surprisingly simple document,
consisting of a single sentence:

The right of gun
companies to make obscene profits convincing morons that their testicles
will fall off if they don’t dump thousands of dollars building up
arsenals to guard against the imaginary impending apocalypse shall not
be abridged.

No other language in it. Hey, they drank a lot back in the 18th century.

Not content with blocking gun safety laws to prevent US shooting massacres, the NRA is working to thwart international action

While
the final funerals for the victims of the Newtown, Connecticut school
massacre have been held, gun violence continues apace, most notably with
the Christmas Eve murder of two volunteer firefighters in rural
Webster, New York, at the hands of an ex-convict who was armed, as was
the Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, with a Bushmaster .223 caliber AR-15
semiautomatic rifle. James Holmes, the alleged perpetrator of the
massacre last July in Aurora, Colorado, stands accused of using, among
other weapons, a Smith & Wesson AR-15 with a 100-round drum in place
of a standard magazine clip.

On
Christmas Eve, the same day as the attack in Webster, the UN general
assembly voted to move ahead with 10 days of negotiations on the arms trade treaty, to commence 18 March. Recall it was last July that the Obama administration
said it "needed more time" to review the proposed treaty, effectively
killing any hope of getting a treaty passed and sent back to member
nations for ratification. This was just one week after the Aurora
massacre, and in the heat of a close presidential election campaign.

The
global treaty shouldn't be controversial. By signing on, governments
agree not to export weapons to countries that are under an arms embargo,
or to export weapons that would facilitate "the commission of genocide,
crimes against humanity, war crimes"
or other violations of international humanitarian law. Exports of arms
are banned if they will facilitate "gender-based violence or violence
against children" or be used for "transnational organized crime".

The
treaty deals with international exports of weapons and ammunition, not
any nation's internal, domestic laws that govern the sale or use of
guns.

Although
official Washington is currently fixated on the so-called “Fiscal
Cliff,” the biggest threat to American prosperity is the debt ceiling,
which must be raised in February
to prevent economic catastrophe. If Republicans refuse to reach a deal
on the so-called cliff, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that
they will spark a new recession in 2013.
But if Republicans block action on the debt ceiling, they will make
that potential recession look quaint. Without raising the debt ceiling,
the United States will be forced to embrace austerity so severe it will
lead to “a bigger GDP drop than that experienced during the Great Recession of 2008.”

But
in an interview on Fox News Sunday this morning, Sen. Lindsey Graham
(R-SC) threatened to oppose this must-pass bill unless Social Security
benefits are taken away from millions of future retirees:

I’m
not going to raise the debt ceiling unless we get serious about keeping
the country from becoming Greece, saving Social Security and Medicare
[sic]. So here’s what i would like: meaningful entitlement reform — not
to turn Social Security into private accounts, not to take a voucher
approach to Medicare — but, adjust the age for Social Security,
CPI changes and means testing and look beyond the ten-year window. I
cannot in good conscience raise the debt ceiling without addressing the
long term debt problems of this country and I will not.

Fiscal cliff curb talks predictably broke down again when Republicans made a late demand for cuts to Social Security in the form of chained CPI:

Talks
foundered after Republicans dug in in an effort to get the largest
deficit reduction deal in the time remaining, according to numerous
Republican and Democratic officials familiar with the negotiations.
Republicans told Democrats that they were willing to put off scheduled
cuts in payments to health care providers who treat Medicare patients
but that they wanted spending cuts elsewhere.

But it was the inflation
calculation that forced Democrats from the negotiating table. President
Obama has said that in a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction, he would
go along with the change, which would slow the growth of programs whose
outlays rise with consumer prices, and would raise more revenue by
pushing people into higher tax brackets.

Democrats said that Mr.
Obama and Congressional Democrats would accept that change, called
“chained C.P.I.,” only as part of a larger deal that included locking in
well more than $1 trillion in revenue over 10 years, along with other
Republican concessions. Democrats fear that any such concessions now
would only increase demands for addition concessions in the coming
weeks, when talks resume on a “grand bargain” to reduce the deficit.

Why should Americans have to work like slaves with so little paid
vacation or sick time? People in Europe who are every bit as free as
Americans get nearly a month of paid vacation time each year. Why do we
have to work like fucking slaves to enrich the pigs of the 1%?From Alternet:http://www.alternet.org/labor/why-protestant-work-ethic-menace-society?paging=offGood riddance to a religious approach that preached salvation through constant hard labor.

Two
weeks ago Pew Research pinpointed an historic threshold: for the first
time only 48% of Americans deemed themselves Protestant. Yes, the
dominant majority since Puritan days has shrunk to minority status,
alongside (one trusts) its perennial double: the White, Anglo-Saxon
Protestant ruling class.

With the Protestant hegemony fading,
let us project a similar demise for the simplistic, planet-threatening
credo known as the "Protestant Ethic." That triumphant code consecrates
hard work, prosperity and control over nature, complacently measuring
progress by net profit and GNP numbers. Here's a conviction that unifies
our two parties in love with the status quo, along with reactionaries
and fundamentalists everywhere. For all proclaim the Divinity of Hard
Work, that Hard Work Conquers All, even that Work is Salvation, as both
sign and vehicle of "exceptionalism" and personal deliverance.

For
the hard right, does not the magic of hard work resolve crime, poverty,
racial inequality, family shortcomings, economic stagnation and phantom
enemies far and wide? The solution to all hard knocks, these hard
people say, is hard work, the anvil for human destiny -- and beyond.
Gee, what happened to one-time, theoretical promises of greater leisure
time?

Certainly Yanks celebrate that savvy American, Benjamin
Franklin, who elevated thrift, industry, and tenacity; or as he put it,
"Energy and persistence alter all things." But today's ideological folly
distorts the context of birthright, namely background, gender,
education, and family assets. Thus schoolchildren still endure
injunctions to "keep your nose to the grindstone" (ouch), "there is no
substitute for hard work" (Thomas Edison), and my favorite, "hard work
never killed anyone" ("but why take the chance," quipped witty Edgar
Bergen).

Japanese hunters won't kill a single whale this winter, Sea Shepherd activists vow

One of Natalie Fox's most cherished memories is of kayaking just off the coast of America accompanied by inquisitive blue whales.
They came to "hang out with us for two hours", said Fox, a 30-year-old
environmental activist, originally from Cornwall. "The more time you
spend with them in the ocean, the more you realise how special they
are."

Now Fox, a co-founder of the campaigning group Women for Whales, is to be a key player in the Sea Shepherd conservation society's Operation Zero Tolerance. In its biggest venture to date, the society will soon be sending four ships to take on the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean with the aim of preventing the death of even a single whale.

Almost three months ago, Fox, a surfing and yoga instructor, was summoned to Hobart, Australia.
She was responding to an email that read: "There's a spot for you, but
you've got to come, now! To Australia. Right away. And you're
undercover, so you can't tell anyone."

Fox is aware that the
operation will be a challenging one, especially since she is prone to
seasickness. The icy conditions of the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary
– ideal for minke and fin whales but inhospitable for humans – will be a
test, although the chance to see icebergs at close quarters, she said,
will be priceless. However, she will be spending most of her time
cooking, in the galley of the Sam Simon, Sea Shepherd's newest vessel.

She
is putting potential confrontations out of her mind. "I can't think
about it until I'm in the moment or it's happening at that time, and
hope that whatever happens, it's all good," she said.

The secrecy
surrounding her "call-up" was necessary, as Sea Shepherd was in the
process of acquiring the Sam Simon, which Fox has been living on in port
with the other 23 crew members. The 56-metre ship began life as the
Seifu Maru, an ocean research vessel used by the Japanese whaling fleet.
Sea Shepherd said Japanese government officials failed to realise who
was buying it.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

The
2012 elections are over and it was a landmark one for women. Female
voters made up 54 percent of the electorate, and according to exit
polls, 55 percent of those women voted for Obama, coming out in support
of equal pay for equal work, funding for preventative health care, and
the right to decide what they do with their bodies. Thanks to a few key
victories, women now make up 20 percent of the Senate, which boasts its
first gay member in Wisconsin's newly elected Tammy Baldwin. Meanwhile,
wins in the state of New Hampshire have created the country's first
all-female delegation: a female governor, two senators, and two
Congresswomen. This time around, gender, it would seem, trumped
politics.

The question is: does that kind of gender identification have a place in our political system? Simple answer: yes.

Given
the stubborn issues still facing women today, gender matters. In this
past presidential election there was new life in the move to de-fund
Planned Parenthood altogether and a resurrection of the demand that any
health care plan offering abortion coverage be barred from participating
in insurance exchanges under the health care plan. Not that the new
arrivals could turn the tide on those issues alone. Both arms of
Congress are still firmly in the hands of men. Women in, women out --
what's the big deal? Yet, in this past election gender's judicial
flashpoint -- reproductive choice -- was in jeopardy of limiting or
denying that choice. Women saw that threat as no man possibly could.

Here's
a quick glimpse of why gender is every bit as important to the Supreme
Court. In a case brought by four women against AT&T in 2008 and
settled in 2009, the Court ruled that decades-old pregnancy leaves taken
under old pension rules do not have to be counted in calculating
pension payouts. It was a small case, with limited immediate impact.
Business won and women lost -- one of those dissenting was the then-lone
woman on the Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Justice Ginsburg, who
says her tireless support of workplace equality was shaped by her own
professional struggles, wrote: "Certain attitudes about pregnancy and
childbirth throughout human history have sustained pervasive, often
law-sanctioned, restrictions on a woman's place among paid workers and
active citizens."

Here's some cheery news to take your mind off the fiscal cliff curb. Posted two 6:00 pm Saturday on the Chicago Sun-Times, which they are calling an exclusive.

WASHINGTON--President
Barack Obama is urging the Illinois General Assembly to legalize gay
marriage in his home state as lawmakers are poised to take up the
measure as early as this week in Springfield.

"While the president
does not weigh in on every measure being considered by state
legislatures, he believes in treating everyone fairly and equally, with
dignity and respect," White House spokesman Shin Inouye told the Chicago
Sun-Times on Saturday.

"As he has said, his personal view is that
it's wrong to prevent couples who are in loving, committed
relationships, and want to marry, from doing so. Were the President
still in the Illinois State Legislature, he would support this measure
that would treat all Illinois couples equally." Inouye said.

The bill is underway (more here), and enjoys good popular support, and Gov. Quinn will sign it, if it can get out of the legislature.

A
31-year-old woman was arrested on Saturday and charged with
second-degree murder as a hate crime in connection with the death of a
man who was pushed onto the tracks of an elevated subway station in
Queens and crushed by an oncoming train.

The
woman, Erika Menendez, selected her victim because she believed him to
be a Muslim or a Hindu, Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney,
said.

“The defendant is accused of
committing what is every subway commuter’s nightmare: Being suddenly and
senselessly pushed into the path of an oncoming train,” Mr. Brown said
in an interview.

In a statement,
Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having told
the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate
Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers
I’ve been beating them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu
faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack,
officials said.

The victim, Sunando Sen, was born in India and, according to a roommate, was raised Hindu.

“Beyond that, the hateful remarks allegedly
made by the defendant and which precipitated the defendant’s actions
should never be tolerated by a civilized society.”

Mr. Brown said he had no information on the defendant’s criminal or mental history.

“It will be up to the court to determine if she is fit to stand trial,” he said.

Ms.
Menendez is expected to be arraigned by Sunday morning. If convicted,
she faces a maximum penalty of life in prison. By charging her with
murder as a hate crime, the possible minimum sentence she faced would be
extended to 20 years from 15 years, according to prosecutors.

Living
in a nation with a constitution requiring separation of church and
state, it is truly absurd that we still don’t collect property taxes,
business taxes on the money-making, profit-generating properties owned
by religious institutions.

Italy’s Catholic Church
will be forced to pay taxes starting in 2013 after the EU pressured the
country’s government to pass a controversial law stripping the Church of
its historic property tax exemption.

The Catholic Church in Italy
is excluded from paying taxes on its land if at least a part of a
Church property is used non-commercially – for instance, a chapel in a
bed-and-breakfast. “The regulatory framework will be definite by January
1, 2013 – the start of the fiscal year – and will fully respect the
[European] Community law,” Italian premier Mario Monti’s government said
in a statement…

The move could net Italy revenues of 500 million
to 2 billion euros annually across the country, municipal government
associations said. The extra income from previously exempt properties in
Rome alone – including hotels, restaurants and sports centres – could
reach 25.5 million euros a year…

The letter focuses on the consequences of two fathers bringing up a child.

The
letter to be read in church tomorrow to mark the Feast of the Holy
Family has been written by the Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most
Reverend Bernard Longley will say: “Government policy cannot foresee the
full consequences, for the children involved or for wider society, of
being brought up by two mothers without a father’s influence or by two
fathers without a mother’s influence.

“We first learn about diversity and acquire a respect for difference through the complementarity of our parents.”

The letter continues: “The complementary love of father and mother is a precious gift that we should wish for every child.

“We
know that many single parents courageously and generously look after
their children and often struggle to give them a fine upbringing.

On September 11,1973, Pinochet led a Nixon/Kissinger backed Fascist
Military coup in Chile where they over threw the democratically elected
Alliende, a socialist. Subsequently Pinochet's fascists rounded up and
murdered hundreds if not thousands of suspected leftists.

In the
years since the US has provided shelter for numerous fascist murderers
from Pinochet's government and other deposed fascist dictatorships.

SANTIAGO,
Chile — Eight retired army officers were charged on Friday with the
murder of a popular songwriter and theater director, Víctor Jara, who
was tortured and killed days after the 1973 military coup in a stadium
that had been turned into a detention center.

Judge
Miguel Vásquez charged two of the former officers, Pedro Barrientos and
Hugo Sánchez, with committing the murder and six others as accomplices.
Mr. Sánchez, a lieutenant colonel, was second in command at the
stadium. Mr. Barrientos, a lieutenant from a Tejas Verdes army unit,
currently lives in Deltona, a city southwest of Daytona Beach, Fla., and
was interrogated by the F.B.I. earlier this year at the request of a
Chilean court. Attempts to reach Mr. Barrientos for comment were
unsuccessful; his two listed telephone numbers had been disconnected.

Judge
Vásquez issued an international arrest warrant against Mr. Barrientos
through Interpol Santiago and ordered the arrest of the other seven, who
were in Chile. Those charged as accomplices are Roberto Souper, Raúl
Jofré, Edwin Dimter, Nelson Hasse, Luis Bethke and Jorge Smith.

Víctor
Jara, then 40, was a member of the Communist Party and a leading folk
singer in the late 1960s and early ’70s. A day after the
American-supported Sept. 11 coup that ousted the socialist president,
Salvador Allende, Mr. Jara was arrested by the military at the Santiago
Technical University, where he was a professor and researcher, along
with hundreds of students, teachers and staff members.

The
detainees were bused to Chile Stadium, since then renamed Víctor Jara
Stadium, and held in the bleachers for days with thousands of other
prisoners, in the custody of army units brought in from various parts of
the country.

Judge Vásquez established
that Mr. Jara was recognized by military officers, separated from the
rest of the detainees and taken to the basement dressing rooms, which
were being used to question prisoners. There, he was interrogated,
beaten and tortured by several officers, according to the court.

SIX BILLION… According to the Center for Disease Control, that’s the number of reasons we had 11,493 firearm homicides in
the United States in 2009, and the number of reasons why we can’t pass
adequate legislation to control guns. The bottom line: that’s the number
of dollars that the three hundred gun and ammunition manufacturers in
this country make yearly. $6,000,000,000!!

Americans are under the
impression that the National Rifle Association, an organization with
just 4.3 million members, effectively blocks gun control legislation
around the entire country. But how can such a relatively small
organization have so much clout? After all, the American Association of
Retired Persons has nearly nine times that membership—about
36,000,000—and it gets the pants beaten off of it when they try to
negotiate a deal on prescription drugs. Why is the National Rifle
Association so powerful?

The group’s dirty little secret is
that, in spite of what it says in its promotional material, it DOES NOT
represent the voice of the American gun owner. It’s not even
particularly interested in Second Amendment rights. The NRA is all about
its corporate ‘partners’—a portion of those three hundred gun and
ammunition manufacturers who make $6 billion a year—and how to best
protect the companies’ profits. To emphasize this goal, Pete Brownell, a
board member of the NRA, is also the head of Brownells, the “world’s
largest supplier of firearms accessories.”

Since 2005, corporations have contributed between $20 million and $52 million to the NRA; according to a study by the Violence Policy Center,
74% of those contributions are from the gun industry. Back in 1967, the
NRA publicized itself as “not affiliated with any firearm or ammunition
manufacturers or with any businesses that deal in guns and ammunition.”
Today, one part of the NRA website—the part about the kids’ program ‘Eddie Eagle’—still makes that statement. At the same time, they promote their “Ring of Freedom Corporate Partners Program”
where different levels of contributions result in different perks to
the companies involved. Executive vice president Wayne LaPierre promised
in a promotional brochure that the Corporate Partners Program “is
geared toward your company’s corporate interests.”

RUSTON,
La. -- With no health insurance and not enough money for a doctor,
Laura Johnson is long accustomed to treating her ailments with a
self-written prescription: home remedies, prayer and denial.Over
decades, she made her living assisting elderly people in nursing homes
in jobs that paid just above minimum wage and included no health
benefits. So even as her feet swelled to such an extent that she could
no longer stuff them into her shoes, and even as nausea, headaches and
dizziness plagued her, she reached for the aspirin bottle or made do
with a teaspoon of vinegar. She propped her feet up on pillows and hoped
for relief.

"Before I got sick," she said, "I hadn't been to the doctor in 20 years."

After
she collapsed last year and landed in in a local emergency room,
doctors diagnosed her with congestive heart failure, high blood pressure
and hypothyroid. They ordered her not to work. She arranged a Social
Security disability benefit, and she enrolled in Medicaid, the
government-furnished insurance program for the poor. She used her
Medicaid card to secure needed prescription medications. Her ailments
stabilized.But this year, the state determined that the $819 a
month she draws in disability payments exceed the allowable limit. By
the federal government's reckoning, her $9,800 annual income made her
officially poor. But under the standards set by Louisiana, she was too
well off to receive Medicaid.

This is how Johnson, 57, finds herself back amid the roughly 49 million Americans who lack health insurance.
This is why she must again reach into her pocket to secure her
prescription drugs, a supply that runs about $200 a month. That sum is
beyond her, so she has gone more than four months without taking her
pills on a regular basis. Once again, her feet are swelling and her
chest is filling with fluid. Once again, she is confronted with the
realization that a lifetime of labor does not entitle her to see a
doctor any more than it enables her to gain crucial medications.

"It just doesn't seem right to me," she said. "It just doesn't seem fair."

New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent

It
was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that
the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time –
was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI,
the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown,
which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption,
canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs
so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced
to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks
themselves.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a
groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets
(why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left
breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document –
reproduced here in an easily searchable format
– shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional
fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one
another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some
cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council.
And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally
executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS
working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable
peaceful American citizens.

The documents, released after long
delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide
meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six
American universities are sites where campus police funneled information
about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations'
knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information
about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush
Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI –
and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the
protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS
leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and
undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard
FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat
against a political leader (p61).

Incredibly, the Senate rejected all the proposed amendments
that would have brought a modicum of transparency and oversight to the
government's activities, despite previous refusals by the Executive
branch to even estimate how many Americans are surveilled by this
program or reveal critical secret court rulings interpreting it.

The
common-sense amendments the Senate hastily rejected were modest in
scope and written with the utmost deference to national security
concerns. The Senate had months to consider them, but waited until four
days before the law was to expire to bring them to the floor, and then
used the contrived time crunch to stifle any chances of them passing.

Sen.
Ron Wyden's amendment would not have taken away any of the NSA's
powers, it just would have forced intelligence agencies to send Congress
a report every year detailing how their surveillance was affecting
ordinary Americans. Yet Congress voted to be purposely kept in the dark
about a general estimate of how many Americans have been spied on.

Sen.
Jeff Merkley's amendment would have encouraged (not even forced!) the
Attorney General to declassify portions of secret FISA court opinions—or
just release summaries of them if they were too sensitive. This is
something the administration itself promised to do three years ago. We know—because the government has admitted—that
at least one of those opinions concluded the government had violated
the Constitution. Yet Congress also voted to keep this potentially
critical interpretation of a public law a secret.

According to Chelsea Green, the publisher of the new book Nuclear Roulette:

Each
new disaster demonstrates that the nuclear industry and governments lie
to "avoid panic," to preserve the myth of "safe, clean" nuclear power,
and to sustain government subsidies. Tokyo and Washington both covered
up Fukushima's radiation risks and - when confronted with damning
evidence - simply raised the levels of "acceptable" risk to match the
greater levels of exposure.

Nuclear Roulette dismantles
the core arguments behind the nuclear-industrial complex's "Nuclear
Renaissance." While some critiques are familiar - nuclear power is too
costly, too dangerous, and too unstable - others are surprising: Nuclear Roulette
exposes historic links to nuclear weapons, impacts on Indigenous lands
and lives, and the ways in which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission too
often takes its lead from industry, rewriting rules to keep failing
plants in compliance. Nuclear Roulette cites NRC records
showing how corporations routinely defer maintenance and lists resulting
"near-misses" in the US, which average more than one per month.

Truthout interviewed the book's author, Gar Smith:

Mark
Karlin: The first part of your book covers 14 arguments against nuclear
power. Let's talk about a couple, starting with one that is a bit
inclusive of most of the others. What are the catastrophic dangers of
nuke plants that you detail in Chapter 4?

Gar Smith:
Atomic energy is impractical on many levels. Nuclear power has proven
too costly to survive without massive government support and taxpayer
bailouts. Nuclear power is inherently unreliable because reactors must
be regularly shut down to replace used fuel assemblies. Reactors also
experience "unplanned shutdowns," which means they can be offline more
than 10 percent of the time. In 2011, the NRC's own records revealed at
least 75 percent of US reactors were routinely leaking radioactive
tritium.

Nuclear reactors are not energy efficient. They produce
far more heat than they can possibly use. It takes as much as 500,000
gallons of water per minute to keep these plants cool. Even
then, around two-thirds of the heat is wasted and needs to be spilled
into nearby waterways or into the atmosphere. A reactor is like a sports
car built to travel 600 miles per hour in a world where the speed limit
is 60 mph. To operate it safely, you need to have your foot on the
brakes - at all times. And good luck if the brakes fail.

Rainforest Action Network released news today of the unexpected death of executive director Rebecca Tarbotton,
one of the country’s most renowned environmental leaders and the first
woman executive director in the organization’s 25-year history. A
statement from RAN
described Tarbotton, 39, as a “self-proclaimed ‘pragmatic idealist,’”
and said she “was admired by environmentalists and climate change
activists for her visionary work protecting forests, pushing the nation
to transition to a clean energy economy and defending human rights.”

Sierra
Club’s executive director Michael Brune said, “Becky reshaped
Rainforest Action Network, and was a force against deforestation and
corporate greed. She was a rising star. We need more women to be leading
environmental organizations, and losing a leader and friend like Becky
is especially painful."

Just after being her selection as RAN's executive director, AlterNet's Don Hazen interviewed her in 2010. He described
Tarbotton as, “Charismatic, articulate and straightforward, and
seemingly possessing the infamous RAN chutzpah gene.” She “seems the
perfect person to grapple with the conflicting needs and aspirations of
environmentalists who may be feeling on the edge of despair,” Hazen
wrote. “She has the intellectual chops to take on major policymakers and
corporate leaders, while she is hip and crunchy enough to be a role
model for the idealistic young RAN campaigners.” (Read the whole
interview here.)

While
RAN was already a successful organization, Tarbotton helped lead it to
even greater heights in the last few years. "Becky was a leader's
leader. She could walk into the White House and cause a corporate titan
to reevaluate his perspective, and then moments later sit down with
leaders from other movements and convince them to follow her lead,” said
Ben Jealous, executive director of the NAACP and a close friend. “If we
had more heroes like her, America and the world would be a much better
place."

“Our hearts are broken. We lost a powerful, transformative
leader this week. The Rainforest Action Network was her home, but the
world was her stage, and her future was so incredibly bright. We can do
nothing more right now than love her, her family, her husband, and her
friends and colleagues. We know how much she meant to so many,” said
Andre Carothers, chair of the board of directors at Rainforest Action
Network.

NEW
DELHI — A young woman who had been in critical condition since she was
raped two weeks ago by a group of men who lured her onto a bus here died
early Saturday, an official at the hospital in Singapore that was
caring for her said.

The woman, a
23-year-old physiotherapy student whose rape on Dec. 16 had served as a
reminder of the dangerous conditions women face in India, died “peacefully,” according to a statement by Dr. Kelvin Loh, the chief executive of Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.

The
woman, whose intestines were removed because of injuries caused by a
metal rod used during the rape, has not been identified. She was flown
to Singapore on Wednesday night after undergoing three abdominal
operations at a local hospital. She had also suffered a major brain
injury, cardiac arrest and infections of the lungs and abdomen. “She was
courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds, but
the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome,” Dr. Loh’s
statement said.

The police have arrested six people in connection with the attack, Indian officials said.

Revulsion
and anger over the rape have galvanized India, where women regularly
face sexual harassment and assault, and where neither the police nor the
judicial system is seen as adequately protecting them.

As
government officials and the police appealed for calm, protesters
gathered in New Delhi at Jantar Mantar, a popular site for
demonstrations, just after dawn. The roads leading to India Gate, the
site of earlier protests that had turned violent, had been barricaded by
the police, and nearby subway stations were closed. More than 40 police
units have been deployed in the area, including 28 units of the Central
Reserve Police Force, which are national anti-insurgency troops.

Top officials now say that further change is needed, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed his “deepest condolences.”

“We have already seen the emotions and energies this incident has generated,” he said in a statement.
“It would be a true homage to her memory if we are able to channelize
these emotions and energies into a constructive course of action.” The
government, he said, is examining “the penal provisions that exist for
such crimes and measures to enhance the safety and security of women.”

The
six men arrested in the case will be charged with murder, the Delhi
police said Saturday morning, as they, too, asked citizens to remain
calm.

A
Catholic priest in Italy has created a firestorm by claiming that women
bring violence on themselves by serving cold food and dressing
provocatively.

Father Piero Corsi of Liguria sparked outrage after members of his congregation posted his Christmas bulletin
onto Facebook. The flyer, entitled “Women and femicide – healthy
self-criticism. How often do they provoke?” said victims of domestic and
sexual violence should question if they were themselves to blame for
the incident.

The flyer said women “provoke the worst instincts”
and “should search their consciences and ask: did we bring this on
ourselves?”

“The fact is that women are increasingly provocative,
they become arrogant, they believe themselves to be self-sufficient and
end up exacerbating the situation,” Corsi added. “Children are abandoned
to their own devices, homes are dirty, meals are cold or fast food,
clothes are filthy.”

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson